Maggie Smith continues the conversation with ‘Dear Writer’

In recent years, Maggie Smith has continued to expand far beyond the world of poetry, crafting a kind of self-help guide from a series of daily affirmations (Keep Moving), delving into her past for a heartbreaking but ultimately hopeful memoir (You Could Make This Place Beautiful), and even making her debut as a children’s author with My Thoughts Have Wings. 

And yet, across form and structure, the writer’s voice, perspective and presence remain consistent, Smith building on and deepening a continually expanding self-portrait – a trend that carried forward into Dear Writer, released April 1, which finds the Columbus native delivering a malleable how-to guide for fellow creatives.

“I’m 100 percent a poet first in all of these projects,” said Smith, currently working on her first novel. “So, a poet is writing this novel, bless her heart. A poet wrote this craft book. A poet wrote a children’s book. I mean, that’s home base for me, and that’s the place where I start with all of this. And I do think a lot of my humor comes through, and a lot of my Midwestern self, and my mom self. And a lot of my thematic obsessions have traveled in every single book. So, I do think there is some consistency where if people looked at the whole thing, they’d be like, ‘Yeah, this makes sense.’ If you think about it, every single book is part of a continued conversation you’re having with a reader.”

This creative expansion has also allowed Smith to grow as a writer in ways she might not have anticipated. Recalling the mix of thrill and trepidation she felt in first breaching her poetic comfort zone, she equated the experience with someone swimming just out of their depth, their toes stretched out in search of solid ground existent somewhere beneath the water.

“Being in an uncomfortable space as a writer puts me back in student mode, where I know I still have so much to learn,” she said. “But to me that’s such a great space to be in, because it feels like everything is still up for grabs.”

Smith started the initial draft of Dear Writer in the early months of 2020, prior to beginning work on her memoir, eventually sidelining the craft book as You Could Make This Place Beautiful took hold and elbowed its way to the fore. When she returned to the book a number of years later, she opted to scrap what she had written and start from scratch, believing the early version occupied a similar editorial space as her memoir. 

“It was less crafty and more like a memoir, but of the writing part of my life,” said Smith, who will celebrate the release of Dear Writer in conversation with recent Bexley transplant and new neighbor Connie Schultz at a sold-out Drexel Theatre on Monday, April 7. “It was more personal and there were fewer resources for writers. … And when I came back and looked at it, I thought, ‘No. This is more a memoir-craft hybrid, and I want it to be more useful and a little more focused, because now the memoir is the memoir.’ So, I cooked up this idea asking, if there were a recipe for creativity, what would the ingredients be?” 

Starting with an exhaustively long list, Smith gradually whittled it down to 10 essential elements, which also serve as section breaks and help give the book its structure: attention, wonder, vision, surprise, play, vulnerability, restlessness, connection, tenacity, and hope.

A confluence of factors further influenced the direction of the book. These included Smith’s fall 2023 decision to launch “For Dear Life,” a Substack rooted intensely in craft in which the writer routinely shares and discusses the sometimes-chaotic first drafts of past work as a means of stripping some mystery from the process, as well as the series of book tours that accompanied the release of You Could Make This Place Beautiful and the attendant questions raised by audience members that over time coalesced into a single idea. “People were asking me a lot of these craft questions,” Smith said, “and it essentially boiled down to how do you do what you do?”

A mix of craftsmanship and heart, Dear Writer often centers the way Smith slows down to take in her surroundings, exploring how cultivating an openness to this larger world stokes a sense of wonder that remains a key element of her observational style. And while geared toward fellow practitioners, Smith rightly acknowledges that there are lessons to be gleaned from within no matter your profession, writing, “being sensitive, attuned, observant – these things don’t just improve your writing, they improve your life.” 

Throughout, Smith skillfully strikes a balance between her appreciation for the unknowable aspects of the craft and the reality that with practice this magic can be harnessed and refined. 

“I still don’t understand a lot of it. Mercifully, I think a lot of the secret sauce remains secret to us,” Smith said. “But if I understood everything about what I was doing, I wouldn’t do it, because it would be boring. So, I think where the ideas come from, the inspiration, how things click together, those kinds of serendipitous things that happen when you kind of see a way to yoke two unlike things together in a way that really makes a piece sing, all of that is still magic. And I don’t know if I could ever really look behind the curtain enough to really understand it, nor would I really want to. But craft, for me, it answers the question then what? You get this magical idea, or you notice this serendipitous connection, and that attention to craft is what enables you to take that idea and make something of it.”

As a younger writer, Smith absorbed books on craft by the likes of Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird, given as a high school graduation gift) and Elizabeth Gilbert (Big Magic), along with a number of poetry-specific books that helped her to sharpen and refine her literary approach. “A lot of these books first gave me permission to be bad, and I don’t think we can underestimate the power of being told it’s going to be hard at first,” Smith said, and laughed.

When Smith published her first book 20 years ago – an event that serves as a clear line of demarcation in Dear Writer – she said she had not yet cultivated the needed vulnerability to dispense similar critical advice.

“When you’re first starting out … you want everyone else to think you know what you’re doing,” she said. “There’s something to being older where you don’t have to fake it anymore, and it’s actually deeply cool to be like, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing.’ … So, yeah, it’s actually taken me 20 years to learn what I know, but also what I don’t. And now I’m just super comfortable being like, ‘Hey, listen, come over here, sit down. Here are some things that have really been helpful and useful for me. Some of these things may work for you, and others may not.’ I mean, none of us really knows exactly what we’re doing, but if you’re playing the long game, it’s inevitable you’ll improve over time. The only way you can really fail is by giving up.”